Why is competition so important in the free enterprise system?
FREE ENTERPRISE CAPITALISM AS THE FAILED CONQUEROR - ABOUT THE
ENVIRONENT
Poorer nations need to recognize that they are a bigger problem.
Their population growth tends well beyond locally sustainable
levels and their massive export of people is no longer acceptable
in an environment sensitive and conscious world. Every nation needs
to conserve arable lands and natural environments against
population growth. We still lack population control, and in some
instances, reduction, treaties, and we still lack proper
immigration treaties, balancing the numbers so that groups and
nations that are practicing reproduction as a form of conquest, and
as a means to produce a human product intended for export, are
forced to change their attitudes. Deliberate and ignorant
reproduction of an excess to locally sustainable levels has to be
seen as an aggressive, violent, act, and made unacceptable in the
world community. The idea of "human capital" in poor nations needs
to be altered. It is an old idea, but no longer valid in the
today's world with an overburdened planet approaching or perhaps
exceeding the 10 billion level. The idea that the world can and
should be conquered by unfettered reproduction must be completely
ended. Local sustainable levels should be considered as levels
where a reasonable standard of living can be achieved by all, with
a reasonable but not excessive level of economic development. We
must also keep in mind that overcrowding and excessive struggle for
scarce resources does create conflict. It also breeds terrorism and
extremism. That too includes the same principles of programming
with an ideology, and then exporting to invade and conquer, except
the methods are more aggressive and less social.
On the other hand free enterprise faithful rich nation led
capitalism has utterly failed to find ways to do the necessary in
every area of human life, when it comes to the good of the
people.
The ideological legacy of the Cold War extremist dialectic of
communism versus capitalism, seen as a battle to the death of good
against evil, continues to be a major obstacle.
This has led to a number of more specific obstacles related to
progress in environmental issues.
1). Private free enterprise funding for research and development
is largely limited to low risk, high probability of financial
return with profit margin, science. That system of fiscal
accounting, placing expectations of profit ahead of human need
narrowly limits science to very specific activities.
2). In the most rabidly free enterprise countries there is a
strong reluctance against creating nationalized research
establishments, and relatively poor funding of academic research
which again is co-opted for either defense or profit oriented work.
Research for the good of the people is again compromised. Reliance
on purely chanced on spin offs from that type of research tends to
be the rule, not the exception. After all, the fact that something
will make a profit, or will improve defense of it, does not
necessarily say that it is good for the environment. It often
isn't.
The creation of national laboratories, and scientific think
tanks, freed from the politics and economics of free enterprise for
profit restraints is the only logical way to go. That way you can
provide the best facilities to the best minds, without having them
compete with each other in what often becomes a wasteful
reinventing of the wheel, due to the fellow who originally invented
it keeping it a closely guarded secret.
3). It also frees researchers from the constraints that bias
scientific data. In the current emphasis on free enterprise
research, and competition for dollars, truth in science suffers
immeasurably. Only nationalized R&D has a chance at achieving a
greater level of truth. Marketing research to biased and self
serving investors is not the road to purity, but it is a deal with
the devil that R&D has continually and increasingly had to
make.
4). For profit, free enterprise, industries, in many instances
cannot afford to do the necessary to modernize factories and
processes. The cost of modernization either exceeds the margins
available, or the push for maintaining margins and increasing them
is such that the investment is simply not possible. This is worse
in developing nations, and in post Cold War eastern Europe. It is
also worse in China, where American accounting has invaded and
conquered a society which then has been rendered unable to look
after the environment within a traditional American model of fiscal
"responsibility" forcing environmental irresponsibility. You cannot
have both, American free enterprise accounting and environmental
responsibility. That is proven impossible in most of the developing
world. The investors in globalized, free enterprise, will not hear
of it, and do not support it. The statistics are clearly
damning.
This includes such things as making certain that the best stack
scrubbers that can be made are on every industrial smoke stack in
the entire world. Forget the cost. Simply do it. If the economic
system does not support that action, change the economic rules so
that it can be done. The economic rules are the least important
factor, but their effect has become a false dictatorship contrary
to real and immediate needs.
Similarly replacing older oil fired, and all brown coal burning
electric generating facilities. Where they exist it is considered
impossible, under the existing free enterprise capitalist system,
but you have to do it, so you again have to do something outside of
those fiscal rules. The rules don't matter. Replacing those energy
production methods does matter. So you find a way to do it, and
bend the rules accordingly. Something capitalism is not very good
at. It has largely failed at any real pragmatism, other than
understanding pragmatism in purely profit margin terms. The latter
is a road to a mass grave, not a road to prosperity and human well
being.
5). Products that are good for the environment and can solve
environmental issues are not necessarily economical to manufacture
within the existing system. Also they have to compete with very
economical products that offer no environmental value in
comparison. They often cost more to make. Processes for
manufacturing that are environmentally more viable cost more. In
free enterprise capitalism that is the ultimate deciding factor,
more often than not. So it becomes the economic system and its
beliefs that has to be put into question, if progressive change on
environmental issues is to be achieved in any reasonable extent of
time. In some instances this means that the good cannot be achieved
without extensive subsidies, provided from innovative methods of
funding. For instance, nationalizing an industry and using its
profits to support the good of the many rather than the self
interest of the very few. You cannot use that mechanism in free
enterprise capitalism, but you can use it in another, hybrid,
system.
6). Conservation and preservation of natural environments has
long suffered from free enterprise, capitalist profit oriented,
greed. Value, within the rules of the system as it exits, is
profit, not conservation so conservation continually loses nearly
every battle. The rules have to be changed, and the values changed
along with them. That applies to value for arable lands, as well as
for preservation of natural areas. Both are under siege. That the
rules of an economic system have become dictatorial of all values,
is particularly disturbing and dangerous. We have to remember that
we cannot replace what is lost. In many instances it would take
centuries, if ever.
7). Let us not forget that capitalist free enterprise often has
a very ambivalent and destructive attitude to small enterprises and
entrepreneurial pursuits. It likes to destroy them, to teach the
lesson that big corporate enterprises are the only true and viable
value. Isolating, demeaning, and disparaging, the individual and
small group is epidemic in today's capitalist system. That is
partly to crush innovation that is seen as dangerous. After all
there is that parable of the little mustard seed that grew into
something. Well, make the ground infertile so that it cannot grow,
and threaten the behemoths with its differing. In some ways that
process has become a widespread and uncritically accepted fact, and
it also has profound effects on matters concerning the environment.
If big corporate isn't doing it, likely it cannot be done, and
certainly it should not be done, has increasingly been adopted into
the rules of the system. It becomes a system of rules that includes
rules about teaching failure, and that uses social divisive
strategies to prevent successes at the grass roots level.
In conclusion, although we have only touched upon the subject,
and there are many other more specific areas that can be delved
into, we see that the Cold War ideological mentality as the most
significant barrier that has prevented environment and many other
forms of needed progress. The subsequent globalization of free
market and free enterprise capitalism remains an aggressive act, of
the conquering power, against other nations and all other systems
of economic and social organization. It asserts its own rules and
beliefs above all others, and claims spiritual right and truth for
itself. Such hubris used to be considered punishable by the gods,
and perhaps it is.
What the conqueror is doing would be alright, if the aggression
were proving successful in terms of leadership to a truly better
world, with truly better provision for the good of the world's
people. That, however, is something we cannot see in the actual
results. There is too much damage from that aggression, and the
damage is continually growing worse. There is too much damage, in
particular, to the ability of the conquered and the conquerors as
to their being able to achieve the needed without being excessively
constrained by a system of what are proving to be wastefully
dysfunctional beliefs and rules. We see that in issues concerning
the environment, ane the deadlock as to means to solutions. In fact
that dysfunctional system, with its inability to change and to
adopt innovations that stand outside of its own beliefs, is
threatening long term human survival and the quality of life of
every person on Earth. Clearly the conqueror must then be
conquered, to stop the perishing. The hubris must be punished, and
if the Greeks were right in their ideas, it will be punished, most
severely.
Robert Morpheal
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